Business Intelligence (BI) Defined
CIO.com defines Business Intelligence (BI) as a generic reference to a collection of applications that are used to analyze raw organizational data. Typical BI activities include data mining, online analytical processing, querying and reporting. They further explain that the primary reason why a company would utilize BI is to make their more data accessible. The more accessible data is to the users the faster they can identify ways to reduce business cost, discover new business opportunities, and react quickly to adjust prices based on current supply and demand.
One area in which a hospital system could use BI derived from a data warehouse can be seen in the Emergency Room (ER) in regards to the number of doctors and nurse they have working during a full moon for each ER location. In order determine this BI needs to determine a trend in the number of patients seen on a full moon, further more they also need to determine the optimal number of staff members working during a full moon be determining the number of employees to patients ration needed to meet standard patient times and also be the most cost effective for the hospital. This will allow the hospital system to estimate the number of potential patients they will have on the next full moon and adjust their staff schedules accordingly to ensure that patient care is not affected in any way do the influx or lack of influx of patients during this time while also ensuring that they are only working the minimum number of employees to ensure that they still making a profit.
Another area where a hospital system could use BI data regards their orders paced to drug and medical supply companies. BI could define trends in prescriptions given to patients, this information could be used for ordering new supplies and forecasting the amount of medicine each hospital needs to keep on site at a given time. For example, a hospital might want to stock up on materials need to set bones in a cast prior to the summer because their BI indicates that a majority of broken bones occur during the summer due to children being out of school and they have more free time.
